Google is finally doing something about those annoying website notifications

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Have you ever visited a website and were immediately assaulted by requests to enable push notifications? Some sites do it the right way, and then others take advantage of it by tricking visitors into enabling these sorts of notifications.

Well, Google is tired of the shit and will now crackdown on websites with abusive permission requests in an upcoming update to Google Chrome sometime later in July.

Now, this isn’t going to be applied to every website that asks users to enable notifications. They’re only doing this to the worst offenders. Sites that actively try to trick users into allowing notifications and sites that utilize push notifications to spread malware and phishing scams. The percentage of sites doing this is small, but they’re out there, and they have Google’s attention.

Going forward, when a user lands on a website that uses these shady practices, Google will display a warning letting them know the website is trying to trick them into something they’re probably not interested in enabling. According to a recent post on the company’s blog, here’s an example of what type of message that will be displayed: “This site may be trying to trick you into allowing intrusive notifications.”

This is a sigh of relief because there have been many times I have stumbled across sites like this, so it’s good to see the company do something about it. It won’t stop websites from continuing to use it, but it will surely discourage them.

Have you ever been tricked into enabling push notification? Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com or find him on Mastodon or Post.